3 out of 5

I really dug Crickets #1.  Billed as a “new ongoing” by Sammy Harkham, the name didn’t mean much to me now but I’ve since become aware of Harkham’s involved role in the indie industry, namely as editor of Kramers Ergot.  And over the course of my years since buying and reading Crickets, Harkham’s no-beginning / no-ending, slightly surreal, underground style and feathery (a descriptor I’ve stolen from another review but totally apt) pencils lump him in with guys like Jordan Crane and other oddball indies.  In Crickets #1, wholly comprised of the first part of a tale called ‘Black Death,’ about a dude with a whole bunch of arrows sticking out of him wandering through a forest and a golem who follows him, the tone slips between the cracks of horror, and comedy, and crudeness and drama, all without too much direct dialogue: the dialogue we witness feels indirect, just conversations we happen to be overhearing.  Combined with the green hue and open-ended style of Harkham’s story-telling, its wonderfully perplexing and yet readable, with just a dash of creepy.  The horror of mundanity, I would come to read, being a favorite of Sammy’s themes, and certainly apparent in the issues of Crickets that have thus far come out.

Crickets #2 is a different beast.  Black Death concludes and the second half of the tale is equally as entrancing as the first, though leaning a bit more on comedy, and with a “lighter” pink hue to match.  But the effect of this tale is distilled by the rest of the comics included in the issue, which sounds like Harkham’s initial intent for Crickets – one serial plus several mini-comics.  Most of these tales are about the same type of bums as featured in Black Death but with more “true to life” variations on life’s horrors, like teen pregnancy, innocence vs. lust, and… you know, being a cartoonist.  That last one is the rub.  A lot of the strips are “auto-biographical,” and it just doesn’t mesh well with the surrealist Black Death.  The issue is also, in general, a lot more whimsical than #1.  So #2 feels much closer to a solo zine, vs. the polished vibe of issue #1, and the mixing of real life stories with the feature – especially given how completely random some of the half-page strips are – really fucks with the book’s flow, and one’s expectations given the first issue.

Now, as a letter writer points out in issue #3, Harkham hardly even credits himself in book 1: the copyright info is stuck in little print in the middle of several comics near the back of the book, not even the first or last page.  Given that lack of claim, issue #2 could be taken as mental vomit, the non-Black Death portions of the book drawn as a release from finishing what the feature, which might’ve been more taxing.  The book is *wholly* Harkham, after all, so who knows.  Only more issues of Crickets might solve that puzzle.  But since #1 and 2 complete a tale, I’ve isolated them for review, and the juxtaposition of the issues results in the average rating given.

Toots.